Ep #33: Whole Body Gratitude

It’s currently the year 2019, so I know you’ve heard about gratitude. I know you’ve been preached to about gratitude. I know you can’t check out at the grocery store without seeing at least 12 different headlines on beautiful glossy magazines telling you that you should practice gratitude. And maybe you have and maybe intellectually you do, and in your heart and soul you also know that it would be good for you. But you actually haven’t felt what the big deal is yet and if so, that’s okay.

And in today’s episode, I want to present gratitude in yet another way that I hope gets through to you because for me, gratitude is the energy of creation. Gratitude is the energy and the consciousness of receivership and gratitude really is like this portal to the world where you are able to create the life you’ve always dreamed of. So listen in today and join me for a conversation about gratitude that I’m willing to bet is unlike ones you’ve ever heard before.

You are listening to The Art School Podcast; a show for artists and creatives who want to become the next greatest version of themselves. Learn how to cultivate an extraordinary way of being and take the mystery out of making money, and the struggle out of making art. Here is your host, master certified life coach, artist, and former lawyer, Leah Badertscher.

Well hello there all my beautiful creative genius friends out there listening. I’m so glad to have you back. I am doing awesome. I tell you what, I just got off a call. I did a workshop for The Art School. We’re doing a summer workshop series. Today’s workshop was about a very sacred topic, money, and empowering yourselves to be the creative money maker, rain maker that you came to be so that you can do all the things that you came to do.

And I am just on cloud nine after that call and it fits in so much with the topic of today’s podcast, gratitude. And pause for a moment, go back to last week. In last week’s episode, if you listened in you knew I had this shaky unsettling anyway incident with a scary plane ride and I was still unpacking that as I spoke to you and created this podcast for you last week, and I’ve since unpacked my bags, and since unpacked a lot more of that experience and I’m sure I will continue to.

And one of the takeaways of course is just a renewed and heightened sense of gratitude. But then also clarity because you may have heard me talk before about this practice I have whenever I get on airplanes, and part of that is reflection and visioning, just that ability to leave earth for a while and be at 30,000, 40,000 feet and think from that level. 30,000- or 40,000-foot level.

And the other thing is whenever I’m on a plane, I’m like wow, I am glad I don’t have to figure out how to make this thing fly. I’m glad I’m not just given a heap of metal and engine parts and somebody saying you want to go to California today? Here, figure it out, which is kind of ironic because at one time in my life I did think that that was what I liked to do. I even liked to build model rockets. I have an aunt and uncle that worked at NASA as rocket scientists and have their own rocket building company now and I thought that sounds amazing.

It’s no longer exactly what I want to do, even though I love the moonshot thinking now. The whole metaphor is just really interesting to me, but I also love that sitting on a plane and being like wow, my moonshot goals are no longer building a rocket. My moonshot goals are something else, and for some reason, the sense of ease that flows in when I think I don’t actually have to figure out how to get this plane off the ground and into middle space makes what I am wanting to create and experience and contribute so much more doable, relatively speaking.

And I think this near death, if you will, experience with the last plane ride just took that to a whole new stratosphere. We’ll just keep going with that metaphor. A whole new level because really, in those moments like this, I can’t control this in this moment. Everything else seems relatively easy and I can control so much more, and it made me realize where I am still making some things unnecessarily burdensome and unnecessarily complicated.

It was very eye-opening and clarifying. And still, although I’ve done this practice over and over again of asking myself where in my life are there struggles or problems or challenges that really just don’t need to be, where I can really instead of getting so wound up in the ball of yarn that I’m trying to untangle with my mind, where can I just put it down and walk away. And instead of trying to solve a problem or fix something, just create something entirely new.

So that experience will continue to unfold and yield fruits, but I just wanted to let you know that that was kind of where my mind has been since then and it was also very relevant to going into teaching this money workshop today because I think a lot of times if we have not been extremely successful at making money before, whether you’ve struggled or whether you’ve made money, but it just came at such a cost to you that you kind of shrink back from having even more audacious money goals and therefore you’ve limited your capacity to earn and receive, money can feel like this mysterious, hard thing to figure out.

And it really doesn’t have to be, and of the many concepts that I talked about today in the money workshop, which ranged from the ethereal, the energetic, the mindset work, somatic work, to very pragmatic things about pricing and marketing and making offers, the thing that I wanted to share with you today is about gratitude because I feel that gratitude is one of those things that we talk about so often and we preach that we should do it so often but we then therefore actually gloss over how to do it.

We know about gratitude but we don’t, for the most part, we’re not yet consistently understanding or practicing the how and the why because if we knew the how, it leads to these incredibly powerful results and shifts in your life. The why would be obvious. The why would be because you experience so much more love and resilience and joy and abundance, including material abundance, including money wealth opportunities.

So today what I want to focus on first is taking gratitude from an idea into a way of being, into a bodily state, an embodiment of a certain kind of energy where you actually feel changed. So one of the ways I guided participants in the call today was with the prompt that if you’re doing gratitude but only in your mind and not actually embodying it, you won’t feel a shift.

One way you can know that you are on the right track with practicing gratitude is that you should feel moved. And for me, it’s a movement, it’s an emotion that then brings these thoughts to mind that just well up from inside of me like, I love this. I love my life right now. I can’t believe this gets to be my life. Or that most profound simple prayer of all, thank you. But it’s not a perfunctory thank you. It’s not a gratitude list you make at night just to check it off the box. It does soothe your mind a little bit but nothing really changes at a deep level.

Really embodying the energy of gratitude, you feel your heart open. You feel overwhelmed with love. Love and gratitude are so much for me a similar sort of energy and consciousness. It’s so much more than counting your blessings, which again things just become a litany and you don’t really integrate and open and absorb and experience what receiving something and loving it really is.

So gratitude, if not truly practiced, then you’re just denying yourself the gift. You might be thinking in your mind yes, I’m grateful for that, but you actually haven’t fully received it. So you might get the influx in income, you might get the painting sale, you might get the promotion, you might get the guy or the girl, you might get the dream house and then you’re like huh, it’s great but it doesn’t have the same sort of whole being body resonance that part of you senses is available to you.

And I think part of that is we just need to sit with things longer and feel around for that resonance and feel around for when have I felt that, and allow ourselves the time and the presence to really open our heart and be moved by something. And now here’s the kicker. Here is really the opportunity for things that feel like magic and miracles because I said in the intro, gratitude is the energy of receivership.

So when you look at that one way, you look at the things that already exist in your life and you work with yourself with the practice of embodying gratitude. Not just thinking gratitude, not just making a list, but really what does it mean on all levels. Not just mind but body and spirit to be grateful for something, to love so much that this is part of your life and to be changed by that and to be changed and shifted by the emotion that moves through you.

That then is the energy of receivership and then here is what is also very cool about creating things going forward. The more you’re able to be in that state of receivership, the more you are able to intentionally be somebody who’s one of their predominant ways of being is gratitude, which is a state of receivership. Then the more consistently you are in a state of receivership, which mean the more consistently you are an open vessel to receive more.

And stay with me, I know it sounds far out there, but here’s the thing. What if I’m right? I can attest for my own life that this is the case. I can tell you so many stories about clients where this is the case. For instance, one woman in my last Art School started doing a practice where with her non-dominant hand, she felt like that was helpful for her. So just a little sidebar. She wrote the things in life that she already had and what she was blessed with, and then she would also then weave in while she was making this list and really working on being in not just the thought space of I’m making my gratitude list so I can check that off and be a good girl.

She was really working to get herself into a place of being different because of this practice and so she would weave into the mix then things she was grateful for that were also on her desired results vision board, or that were part of her goals and dreams and had not yet physically manifested. And lo and behold, the channel opens and these things start to come into her life.

She had wanted to manifest a certain additional amount of income within the time before Art School was over and her goal, I believe it was that within the span of the Art School, she wanted to make more money from her company in her business than she had in the entire last year. And that she did, and then on her way to more.

So the thing is I can tell you stories but when you start to practice this and you start to really feel gratitude, before things start to happen, you’ll sense that something’s different and that you’re different. This isn’t like the gratitude practices of old where you’re just in your head and you’re just writing it down. But nothing about you as a person has really changed.

The thing is if you want the change, your energy has to change and so first becoming curious about what the true energy of gratitude is, what the true energy of receivership is, and then once you are in that energy, practicing staying in that energy even before you’ve then received outside confirmation or external evidence of the thing that you want to create.

So this brings me to the part of the podcast where I want you to do more than just listen. I want you to take this information and implement it. Don’t just listen. Take the information and make it transformational. Use it to really shift the energy in your life, shift the thoughts, shift the feelings, and then from that flows a different set of actions, a different way of showing up in the world, which inevitably leads to the results that are aligned with your higher self.

So, I have a very special practice to introduce you to today. It’s something that I stumbled into first myself by way of needing to find a way to really experience gratitude and embody it, including for the things I have not yet created, but I wasn’t finding anything out there in the world that really did it for me.

So, again, if you need to hear 1000 times how important gratitude is and that gratitude is a true state of receivership and that it is the portal, the gateway to creating what you really want, then I hope this is the 1001^st time you’ve heard it that gets through. And even more than that, I hope this practice, which I’ve never heard from anyone anywhere else before, really creates a breakthrough for you.

And so the way to do it is, again, to begin by practicing gratitude as an entire state of being. And you’ll know you’re there when you’re feeling moved by it. So, for instance, on a call today – this was one of the practices I walked the workshop participants through – I was talking about when I envision a future state for which I’m very grateful, and I reference past or current states where I’ve really felt gratitude, not just thought it. What overwhelms me is this feeling of love and feeling of openness. And it is a feeling of, I’m deeply moved.

I couldn’t even start talking about it in the workshop today without crying. I didn’t even get very far into, I’m just so grateful that I get to do this work and I love this and I love that this is my life. I’m so profoundly grateful that this is my life and that this is what I get to do. I’m so profoundly grateful that I had this vision and then I stuck with it through plenty of times when I could have quit. I stuck with it and I’m so profoundly grateful to that girl that had the vision and stuck with it and whatever it is in me that’s kept me going so that now too, I get to experience the work and doing the work that I get to experience and the life that I get to experience.

So basically, I work myself up into this state of truly being moved and truly being in a state of gratitude, and then I think of more things in my life for which I have this same energy of love, of gratitude. And then I think of something I want to create that I have created but it hasn’t manifested yet in the world, but for instance I’ve decided and it’s done deal.  No longer, is it going to happen, but it is going to happen and now I get the joy and the fun, the experience, the life of seeing how it unfolds. So for instance, my two million moonshot goal or my published novel.

So I will first, again, put myself in that state of being where I am overtaken by gratitude. I’m no longer thinking it, willing it to be, forcing it. I’m just really feeling it and I’m in that energy and it’s a different level of consciousness. It feels entirely different in my body and in my mind. And then I call to mind, let’s use the published novel, for instance. And then I think of it as a memory.

I think of it not as something that’s going to happen in the future, but I think of it as something that happened yesterday. So I might start with, I got to take my children to the lake this weekend, our whole family went to the lake to celebrate Father’s Day and we ate at this special place where we’ve been going ever since they were children and it’s magical. The whole experience is magical and our family bonds around this beautiful big body of water and those whole days feel sacred.

And that already starts my heart opening. And then I think, and you know what else happened really cool this weekend? I signed, on the dotted line, my publishing deal. And it gives me this both expansive feeling in my heart and then also this very solid settled feeling. I can really feel gratitude and a sense of doneness coursing through my body as I recall and remember what it was like to sign that publishing deal the same weekend, within that same envelope in space of gratitude that I generated.

So I’m not thinking it’s in the future yet, I am remembering it. And it’s a very subtle thing and give yourself time and patience and plenty of room to let your imagination play and feel around for this, but there’s a shift. Think of something and you can kind of toggle back and forth to notice the difference. Think of something you want to create, even if you’re super confident about it. And feel how it is to imagine it happening out there in the future and then contrast this with this experience of remembering it as if it were yesterday, of letting it run through your mind as if recalling a true-life memory. Let it run through your mind and let that mental movie then conjure up experiences within your body and notice what those are, and stay with those and practice sustaining those.

Part of my own practice then, and also what I guide and advise clients to do, is then to notice what other emotional states, ways of being, accompany this experience and what thoughts come to mind.  And I’ve shared with you before that mine often is like a sense of deep settledness and relaxedness, while also feeling very powerful.

And it goes beyond confidence. It goes to just knowing that I will do what I have said I will do, that it is happening, which allows me to feel so much more stable as the day to day of life, it might go up, it might go down, but I’m not on that rollercoaster. And the other thing that it has allowed me to do is to feel so much more freedom, because I’m willing to take risks, I’m willing to try things because I’m off that rollercoaster and I know what it’s like, I know how to get back to that feeling of gratitude, that it’s already happened, and that deep settled conviction that it’s done as well. It’s really liberated my ability to create, whether it’s an offering in my business, art, and money, but also just to offer my truth, like I’m sharing with you today.

And I’ve seen this change my clients and transform their creative process and their lives as well. So I’m really excited to share it with you today and I would love to hear from you what you are grateful for, what it feels like to you, and what you’re grateful for that hasn’t even yet happened but you’re already receiving it.

Thank you again so much for listening to another episode of The Art School Podcast. I am very grateful for you. And I want to not only say that because I deeply feel it, and I also want to connect with you. So if you want to send me an email and tell me what’s been helpful for you, what you’d like to hear more of, if you want to sign up for a discovery consult and ask questions or get free 20-minute coaching, you can do that by emailing me at leah@leahcb.com.

You can also – and I would be so grateful if you did – leave a review on iTunes. So you can go to my website, www.leahcb.com/itunes and see how to do that. It means so much to me and it really goes a long way in helping me to reach more people with this work. And I really sincerely do hope that episodes like this one on gratitude really blow open all the channels in your life so that you are able to receive and create all the abundance and all the support you need to do the work and to be the person and have the experiences that you really came here for, that are aligned with your higher self for you.

It is enough if you do that for you. And here’s what else I know; the more you practice gratitude, the more, like, that survival mode in your settles down. The more the anxiety settles down. The more you’re able to shift out of fight or flight and into a more powerful loving and creative state, which is good for you. And again, that’s enough. And also, it’s the state from which then you are effortlessly able to contribute and give, share your talents and gifts with the world, heal in the ways that you are meant to heal. And that’s good for all of us.

Like you’ve heard me say before, artists help the world move forward. So whether you think of yourself as an artist or not, substitute in that, like, creative person, creative soul. I really do think it’s you, the creative souls out there, that are meant to help us move the world forward and in deeply healing meaningful ways. And you also deserve healing and a full life yourself. And gratitude truly is one of those ways where you open yourself to receive all of the energy and all of the gifts already in your life and you open yourself to receive even more.

So now, for the closing bookend of the podcast. A quote for you that I also shared with the workshop participants today, “Creation is only the projection into form of that which already exists.” Srimad Bhagavatam. Have a beautiful week, everyone. I hope you receive it fully and may even more gifts flow to you. Have a beautiful week.  I love you and I will talk to you next time, bye-bye.